1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for searching for recommended music using the emotional information of music. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus that enable recommended music to be searched for using the emotional information of music by extracting emotional values including a valence value and an arousal value from an input search condition when a predetermined search condition is input by a user, searching a music emotion database using the emotional values, and outputting a recommended music list based on the results of the search.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, it has been possible to play music content on various types of devices such as smart phones, MP3 players, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), computers, and digital audio equipment. The various types of devices have become widely dispersed, so that music files have also become popularized. Therefore, the number of music files personally held by a user is on a gradually increasing trend. Further, as the number of music files a user can personally access increases in geometrical progression, it becomes more and more important to obtain methods of efficiently finding the user's desired music files.
In a prior art, in order to search for and recommend music files, information about music genres or artists (musicians or singers) has been used. However, in order to use genre and artist information, there is the inconvenience of requiring information related to the preliminary classification of genres and artists and of having to be previously aware of the names of artists, the titles of songs sung by relevant artists, etc.
Further, technology for searching for and recommending music based on emotions or the atmosphere created by music (disclosed in Korean Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 10-2010-0024769 entitled “Music recommendation system and method”) has recently been presented. However, this technology is disadvantageous in that emotions felt by users while listening to music, or the atmosphere provided by music are subjective and vague, thus making it difficult to classify and express music as a single emotional type. Furthermore, such a conventional emotion-based music recommendation system has employed a scheme for recommending music corresponding to a relevant emotion if limited emotional keywords are selected one by one, or if a two-dimensional (2D) plane is divided into areas corresponding to respective emotions and then an emotion corresponding to a selected area is selected. As a result, this scheme cannot accurately provide a recommendation list with respect to a user's desired music.
That is, the prior art is problematic in that it is impossible to express or select mixed emotions felt in a single piece of music, and an interface is not intuitive, thus deteriorating the user's satisfaction with the results of the recommendations.